expert systems

Alan Renwick of University College London has set conditions for Andy Burnham's electoral reform plans to secure political legitimacy. Renwick argues the process must involve public deliberation, remain open-minded about which voting system consultation reveals as the preferred option, and listen to experts. His comments add expert scrutiny to reform proposals championed by the Greater Manchester mayor.

Policy debate is turning to how the health sector should manage artificial intelligence tools that are being adopted faster than safety rules are being written. The core concern is that AI systems used in diagnosis, administration and patient care lack clear regulatory guardrails, leaving providers, developers and regulators to weigh innovation against patient safety without an established framework.

AI startup IQuest Research has released IQuest-Q1, an open-source mixture-of-experts model with 320 billion total parameters but only 15 billion active per query, aimed at agentic coding tasks. The sparse architecture promises large-model capability with much lower inference costs. It arrives as competition intensifies among open-weight coding models, and developers are weighing its benchmarks and licensing against rivals like DeepSeek and Qwen.

A new analysis warns that fraud carried out with AI-generated deepfakes is raising the liability stakes for banks and companies. As criminals use convincing synthetic voices and video to impersonate executives and clients, institutions face growing questions over whether they can be held legally responsible when such scams slip through verification systems. Legal experts are weighing how existing duties of care apply to this fast-moving technology.